New Collaboration with Planet Money

We are starting a collaboration with Planet Money, one of my favorite podcasts of any kind, to provide introductory articles on some important topics. The first one, National Debt for Beginners, went up today. Loyal readers of our Beginners series should recognize the format and style; Planet Money should help us reach a larger audience for this type of information.

Thanks for working with Planet Money. They need an infusion of new energy. Their “giant pool of money” piece from last year was brilliant, and they followed it up with lots of good stuff. But they’ve been very poor on covering toxic assets and etc since then. Help them find their voice again, please.

Next time you’re on planet money, could I make a suggestion, do more stuff on “credit default swaps” cause its one thing that’s been really bugging for the past few months.

Personally I can’t see this credit crisis ending until the big black hole of “credit default swaps” which create lots of “credit” and thus uncertainity because of counterparty risk is addressed.

Personally I’d think a carefully drafted rule would not penalize owners of CDS contracts who own the underlying security would be the best solution; in other worlds we need a rule or tax law that acts something like a smart bomb that can destroy a bunker without causing much surrounding collateral damage. For owners of CDS contracts who own the underlying security I’d also limit the pay off to the actual loss. To understand why I think there needs to be a limit on CDS contracts, consider for a moment a person owns home that cost a million dollars to buy and build, but has a 10 million dollar insurance policy on the home against loss. See the problem? An unscrupulous individual might over insure a property because they don’t really give a damn about home itself, what they are after is the big insurance pay off if they torch the home.